July 29th, 2016

The fourth book in the Frank Einstein series is hitting bookstore shelves on September 6, and I got a box of the lovely things in the mail this week. This time, the focus is on biology and evolution. Frank, Watson, and the robots are camping while doing their science thing and saving the world from T. Edison and his simian sidekick. Four down, two to go.

October 7th, 2015

I don’t enter many illustration awards competitions. So, consequently, I don’t win many illustration awards. And as an illustrator, I sure never thought I’d win an award from an audio magazine. So it was pretty neat the other day to get a package in the mail from AudioFile Magazine, which is a magazine about audio books.
There have been three books published in the Frank Einstein series, and each of them has a corresponding audio book. For each of these, I’ve trekked up to New York to a recording studio and recorded the robot parts from the books (Jon Scieszka reads the rest of the voices and the narration). I record these in character, with different inflections and personalities for the two robots, Klink and Klank, and then I take the resulting audio files and dress them up with some fun audio gear until they sound like robots. Or, like how I think robots should sound.
Fast forward a bit of time, and AudioFile magazine published a wonderful review of the first audiobook, Frank Einstein and the Anti-Matter Motor, and awarded us an “Earphone Award,” which even though it looks a lot like a certificate of participation that my kids get when their teams come in last place in sports, I’m very excited that the work got this recognition.

And lastly, if you read this far, you deserve to see this. Yes, I don’t just provide the voice of robots. I wear a giant robot head for video as well.

July 28th, 2014

The mail-bot at the postal office done good today. One of the best days is the day where a real live copy of the book you’ve been going crazy working on (a year or six months ago) finally appears, and it’s bound and real and has a bar code and an ISBN and the ink smells funny and the colors look correct and they spelled your name right. That’s what this is all about.*

September 6th, 2013

For the last five years, I’ve been pretty busy. I counted, and since 2008 I’ve illustrated around thirty books. So as you might imagine and hopefully understand, it’s been a while since I drew pictures just because it’s something I like doing. But this last week I’ve been kind of at it. There are some projects that are hovering over this process and they make themselves known as I’m scribbling, (robots, astronauts, lettering), but they’re not the sole reason for doing these nor are they the determined destination. Let’s say that for the last couple of years I’ve been sketching on the interstate, in a hurry to get somewhere. It’s nice now taking the windy little roads through towns and through the back woods, not sure where I’ll stop and what I might see.*
In related news, I finally put together an exposure unit for screen-printing, so maybe these will lead to that. Maybe I’ll try taking some life-drawing sessions and see what happens as well.